july has traditionally been a prolific month for me in this book challenge, and this july did not disappoint! i'm a little behind my pace from last year, but this helped me catch up a bit. i read four nonfiction books this month, which hasn't been the norm for me - this month i read:
outliers, by malcolm gladwell (this is the all-school summer reading for the school where i work, and the only major gladwell book i HADN'T read, so it was a good excuse to get a free copy and read it. a lot of gladwell's most famous stories are here - the 10,000 hours needed to become an expert and why NHL players are all born in january - but there's definitely more here than that. it was a quick read, and a good one! if you're somehow a person on this planet who hasn't read something by malcolm gladwell, you should definitely correct that. pronto.)
blood done sign my name, by timothy tyson (an amazing memoir-history; the author grew up in a small town in north carolina, and was a child when a black man was killed in public by a white man (for making a comment to the white man's wife), and the white man was found not guilty of the murder. this was not in the early 1900s but in 1970. the book is a retelling of the crime and the trial, but also the history of the small town in north carolina and a look at the role of religion in the civil rights movement (the author's father was a progressive methodist minister in the town). fascinating read, and it complicates our understanding of the history of the civil rights movement. i can't recommend it highly enough. i cried reading the acknowledgements at the end of the book. THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. who am i?)
as i lay dying, by william faulkner (a re-read - i took a faulkner course in college and this was one of my favorites from that class. when re-reading my college copy, i was impressed by all my margin notes, and enjoyed the story and faulkner's writing style the second time around. in high school i imagined faulkner to be IMPOSSIBLE TO READ, but an instructor in the 20th century american lit class i took at duke put a faulkner book in the syllabus, and i loved it. that led me to take the semester-of-faulkner and enjoy the class immensely. this is one of those IMPORTANT AMERICAN AUTHORS that SMART PEOPLE LOVE who is, in fact, worth loving.)
the warmth of other suns, by isabel wilkerson (i listened to the audiobook of this one, which is (wait for it) 19 CDs long. it took weeks of driving around town and two long road trips to make it through the book. my aunt monica recommended this book to me: it's the story of the great migration, interwoven with the oral histories of three people who participated in the great migration - one in the 1930s, one in the 1940s, and one in the 1950s…one to new york, one to chicago, one to LA…one who became a doctor, one who worked for the railroad, one who worked in a factory - three lives to symbolize the various experiences that blacks had of the great migration. a plus, the audiobook narrator on this book did a great job (she did great voices for each of the characters, none of them cheesy), which is crucial. a long book, but very worth reading!)
how children succeed, by paul tough (my office at work selected this as our office summer reading, so i dutifully read it. the book is a little more targeted towards people who work with low income students, but there were some important take aways that will translate to our work with mostly privileged kids, too. a lot of the book was a review of grad school: carol dweck's work on fixed vs. malleable intelligence, the KIPP/riverside character report card. thank you, grad school, for giving me a basis of educational theory!)
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